Monday, September 9, 2013

TED Talks Vs Rupert Sheldrake and others

Some time ago the logos of various MNCs started appearing in the TED Talks. That's when my suspicions began. Huge funding means strings attached, and ideological subversion is a logical consequence. Even the quality, the out-of-boxness of the talks is going down and down from what I've seen recently, and the TEDx talks are coming way better than the official TED ones. There are several TED Talks in the pile that are downright misled or misguided in many arenas. There's even one TED Talk talking about the dangers of simplifying neuroscience that debunks another TED talk that was recommending 8 hugs a day to be happy. I feel this would have been the right way forward. I can't comment much on the detractors of Rupert Sheldrake's talk. It was too short for details : I found better content in his longer talk titled "Science Set Free" at Electric Universe conference.
But out of the 10 things he talks about, if anyone has anything to passionately, intuitively and clearly debunk then they should come forward with a talk of their own! Explain clearly how the speed of light is or is not a constant. Tell me why it's perfectly logical for all the constants to keep on changing, and why G needs to averaged. Explain clearly how the feeling of being watched, how the reach of mind outside the human brain is total junk. Explain clearly how the real-life eyewitness out-of-ordinary experiences of practically every family on this planet can be totally explained away while staying within the confines of institution-accepted science. Prove conclusively how all animals apart from man are not conscious, sentient beings and convince us why we should completely ignore the overwhelming observations in real life that tell us the opposite. If anyone wants to prove each and everything he's saying as totally false, then DO IT PROPERLY, SCIENTIFICALLY. Don't be a bloody high priest and banish the Talk! There's scores of WAY WORSE Ted Talks out there (incl nearly all the ones with speakers from US military or govt) that deserve to be taken down way more than this one. No Sir, there was clearly a reason other than scientific accuracy for removing these talks.
Links:http://blog.ted.com/2013/03/14/open-for-discussion-graham-hancock-and-rupert-sheldrake/

Aww man, look at this excerpt of Sheldrake's response:
In my talk I said that the published values of the speed of light dropped by about 20 km/sec between 1928 and 1945. Carroll's "careful rebuttal" consisted of a table copied from Wikipedia showing the speed of light at different dates, with a gap between 1926 and 1950, omitting the very period I referred to. His other reference (http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/lightandcolor/speedoflight.html) does indeed give two values for the speed of light in this period, in 1928 and 1932-35, and sure enough, they were 20 and 24km/sec lower than the previous value, and 14 and 18 km/sec lower than the value from 1947 onwards.

Here's my comment on that page:TED, you have published a talk which claims that 8
hugs a day is all that’s required to be happy, healthy. And then another
talk that refutes the oversimplification of effects of hormones, and
which explicitly refutes the first talk. THAT would have been a sensible
way of refuting Sheldrake or Hancock’s talks. You even have a talk
claiming that cooked food made man more intelligent – while that hasn’t
been decisively disproven, it’s not been proven as the only causal
factor. But you didn’t take that down; yet in the same circumstances you
have taken these talks down. How come? There are several far more
ridiculous TED and TEDx talks out there but this method is of course the
wrong way to go about it. Since this incident you’ve lost my trust and
I’ve stopped following you the way I used to. I’m now ashamed of being
identified among peers as the guy who’d downloaded nearly all the talks
and who would always talk about them. I’d been suspicious ever since I
had started seeing major exploitative MNCs’ logos appearing in the
Talks. With major funding comes ideological subversion, and it’s
apparent that you have been subverted.
(http://blog.ted.com/2013/03/14/open-for-discussion-graham-hancock-and-rupert-sheldrake/comment-page-39/#comment-43870)